The media should achieve a better balance in their coverage of lifelong sports, but newspapers are under heavy pressure to publicize only the spectacular professional contest, for that’s what sells papers. I see some hope in television. Its generalized sports programming has begun to include a commendable scatter of types.
Governing authorities should give strong support to these lifelong sports and provide public facilities on which they may be pursued. To do less is to short-change the health of the general population.
However, the responsibility for devising a lifelong program of exercise that will enhance general well-being rests upon the individual. The serious athlete has a particular responsibility. Handball and squash are ideal first steps after varsity or professional competition. These can be supplanted later by less energetic tennis and golf, with walking, fishing and boating for the really advanced years. It could all be so simple.
Two athletes I met during the course of this study have been exemplars of how transitions should be made. The Sewell brothers, Joe and Luke, formed one of the preeminent brother acts in big-league baseball. They were born in the small Alabama town of Titus, Joe in 1898, Luke in 1901. Joe was picked up by the Cleveland Indians, with whom he played shortstop and third base for eleven years, ending his career with the New York Yankees three years later in 1933 at the age of thirty-four. He was a good batter—.353 one year, .312 lifetime—and still holds the record for being able to defend himself at the plate. In 1930 he struck out only three times during the entire season, and he repeated this feat in 1932. He told me, ‘I still have the bat I used in batting practice. In the fat part there’s a stain just a little bigger than a baseball. That means I hit the ball every time the same way—right on the button.’
Luke also started for Cleveland, in 1921, as their catcher, and ended his playing career an amazing twenty-two years later with the St. Louis Browns in 1942. He passed easily into a long tenure as manager. St. Louis Browns at first, then the Cincinnati Reds from 1949 through 1952, when he quit baseball.
I met the brothers at a celebration when they were aged seventy-six and seventy-four respectively. They were sharp-eyed, about the weight they had been in their heyday, alert, witty and delightful to be with. If you wanted to talk about the old days, they were willing to spin yarns about Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. Catcher Luke could tell you the strengths and weaknesses of the major batters. ‘Lou Gehrig didn’t have any weaknesses,’ he told me as we yarned.
But if you preferred talking politics or business or the coming election, they were just as informed. When Joe left baseball he had found a job at the University of Alabama which allowed him spare time to farm. Luke had become a banker in Akron, Ohio, specializing in business loans.
I asked these unusually bright septuagenarians what had helped them make the transition from professional ball to private life, and Luke explained: ‘Two things. You get hungry. And you open your eyes.’ Sport had revolutionized the lives of these two farm boys. But they had always known it to be a sometime thing, and when their playing days were over they intelligently hacked out a place for themselves in the larger world. They had maintained their active lives, found new occupations, and guarded their health. Talking with them about either the old days or the present was a privilege.
It is this kind of orderly transition that I wish for everyone. In the case of the professional athlete, his failure to make the shift is tragic; his success in making it heart warming. But it is the average man and woman in whom I am principally interested. We should not end our active lives at twenty-five, nor at forty-five, nor at sixty-five. Life should be a constant progression, filled with those testing and rejuvenating activities appropriate for each passing decade.
TEN
The Media
If the individual’s participation in sports can best be understood as a form of dance, professional performance must be studied as a form of entertainment. Newspapers, radio and television, aware of this fact, have prudently presented sports as entertainment.
Consequently, one of the happiest relationships in American society is that between sports and the media. This interface is delightfully symbiotic, since each helps the other survive.
In the early years of this century baseball prospered mainly because it received at no cost reams of publicity in daily and Sunday papers. Coverage which any other business would have had to pay for as advertising was given freely because of its entertainment value. The newspapers knew what they were doing; by offering exciting news about the Cobbs and Speakers they maintained their circulation and increased it. One of my first jobs as a boy was picking up the Sports Extra of the Philadelphia Bulletin each summer night at 6:05 and rushing copies through our village so that fans could learn how their Athletics and Phillies had done that day. I remember how avidly the men grabbed for my wares.
In recent years radio and television have given golf and football the same kind of free advertising, enabling those two sports to mushroom into fantastically profitable forms of entertainment. Of course, radio and television grew along with the sports, and at times because of them. I have often speculated as to which explosion, golf or football, represented the bigger television marvel. One is tempted to say football, but this commanded an audience as far back as the 1890s; all that television did was to increase football’s existing excitement some thousandfold. But in the case of golf, television took a game which had not previously enlisted much public support and converted it into a compelling event. For this reason golf may be a profitable takeoff point for a discussion of what changes overtake a sport when it is transformed from a private exercise into a public entertainment.
Golf had been a game for gentlemen, begun in Holland but now governed by royal and ancient rules developed at St. Andrews in Scotland. It was traditionally played in an atmosphere of austere silence before few or no spectators. The most interesting tournaments were conducted under the rules of match play, in which the total number of strokes required to complete a round of eighteen holes mattered little. Two men completed one against the other, and what did count was the number of individual holes each won. A match would be over if Player A was three holes in the lead with only two left to play. Obviously Player B could not catch up, so A won, 3 and 2. But if Player A had won the first ten holes in a row, Player B couldn’t possibly catch up, either, and then the score would be 10 and 8.
This was exciting golf, and two of the four championships Bobby Jones won when making his grand slam in 1930 were match play. Its fatal weakness when television arrived was twofold: no one could predict how long a match would last, and it could be decided on a hole where no television cameras were stationed.
When I attended my first golf matches, the players would rebuke anyone on the course who dared make a sound during play, and newsreel cameras were absolutely forbidden.
With the advent of television all this had to be changed. Since cameras were essential, they had to be endured. In the early days one irate champion said, ‘I’ll never accept a grinding camera on the course when I’m playing,’ and a television executive observed, perceptively, ‘When we start to offer big money, he’ll learn to.’
Match play, with its essentially difficult system of keeping up with the score, simply had to be abandoned in favor of the simpler medal play, in which a player’s total score for 72 holes competed against the total scores for dozens of other players. But this raised a new problem. Was Player A, who was on the final green with 271 and about to take two putts, ahead of or behind Player B, who was on the sixteenth green with 263 and about to take one putt? I remember those first televised tournaments; no one could keep the comparative scores straight or know who was winning.
But then some genius came up with the solution: state at every point during the 72 holes how each player relates to par for the holes so far played. Thus, in the example just given, Player A, who is going to two-putt the eighteenth, will wind up with a score of 273, and since the par for one round is 71, he will be eleven str
okes better than total par of 284, and the board will show a –11.
Player B, at the sixteenth, is going to one-putt, and he will be 264 at that point, with a par 4 seventeenth and a par 5 eighteenth awaiting him. He, too, should end his round at 273, which means as he finishes the sixteenth he is also –11. The two players are tied, but if Player B can score even one birdie on his last two holes he will finish with a –12 and will win outright.
If not, the two players will end the tournament in a dead heat, at 273 each. In the old days this would necessitate a next-day play-off of eighteen holes, a solid test of who was the better man. But with a huge Sunday-afternoon television audience already tuned in to the entertainment and eager to know who will win, the continuation of a tournament final till Monday, when people will be at work and unable to follow the tube, is unreasonable, so a sudden death has been devised. Take the two or three players who tied for first and have them start playing another round, with victory going to the first man who wins a hole outright.
This is a brilliant concept, somewhat opposed to the traditions of golf, to be sure, but a reasonable solution to a television problem and a satisfying compromise for the audience. However, the competing players cannot start their confrontation at the first hole, because no semi-permanent cameras have been installed there. There are cameras, however, at holes 15, 16, 17 and 18. So sudden-death eliminations start at hole 15, proceed to hole 18 if necessary, and if the players are still tied, return to hole 15 for another sequence.
Traditionalists deplore such changes. They argue that match play, one man against one, is the toughest test a golfer can face, because he must remain at top form every day and defend himself against the unknown who is on a hot streak and eager to knock him off. ‘Look at the way Jack Nicklaus wins a tournament,’ a classicist told me mournfully. ‘He cards a 73 the first day, then pulls himself together, finishes with two 66’s, and is hailed a winner. Hell, in match play he’da been out on his duff that first day.’ The purist also objects to sudden death, claiming with some justice that it is unfair to require a player who has struggled doggedly to achieve a tie over 72 holes to hazard everything on one lucky shot on the sudden-death fifteenth.
Old-timers also resent discarding the former pattern of eighteen holes on Thursday, eighteen on Friday and a really demanding thirty-six on Saturday. ‘That showed who the real men were,’ the traditionalists argue. But television cannot easily absorb two rounds played on a single day, so it has dictated one round each on Thursday through Sunday.
I like every one of these changes, for they have made watching golf accessible to millions. Without them, the game could not have been utilized by television, and the entertainment feature of the sport would have been either lost or severely circumscribed. In an average year television pumps $4,000,000 into golf, allowing players to earn incomes like these for 1974: Johnny Miller, $353,021; Jack Nicklaus, $238,178; Hubert Green, $211,709. If a sport is to draw down its share of the fantastic amounts of entertainment money now circulating, it must accommodate itself within reason to the peculiar demands of television. I judge that golf has not been required to alter its basic characteristics or endanger its basic honesty. Its deal with television has been an honorable one, and it has sacrificed no fundamental. Certainly, it has not prostituted itself the way baseball did in the 1972 World Series.
Cincinnati was playing Oakland for the championship, and Commissioner Bowie Kuhn decided, wisely I believe, to schedule the weekday games for night viewing so as to attract the maximum audience. Gone would be the spectacle—on Monday through Friday of World Series week—of the American businessman casting one eye at the company ledger, the other at the television set secreted in the corner of his office.
But to provide night baseball was easier said than done, because Oakland is three hours behind the huge viewing audience of the east coast. If the game were really played at night in Oakland, say at eight o’clock, it wouldn’t come on the tube in New York City until eleven, which would mean that it would end sometime around one-thirty the next morning.
An appalling solution was devised. Start the game in Oakland at 5:30 P.M., which would place it on eastern screens at the best possible hour, 8:30 P.M. The only trouble was that the actual playing of the game in California would take place in half-twilight, when the ball would be difficult to see and when nature’s light would be intermixed with electric.
That was a dubious concession to make in the first place, but worse was to come. A sudden rainstorm on Tuesday night forced the cancellation of the third game of the series in Oakland. This was a stroke of bad luck which Commissioner Kuhn could not have foreseen, but it forced postponing his schedule a day. This required some gymnastics. By the time the fifth game came around, it had to be played in Oakland in half-light, after which the two teams had to scramble into airplanes, fly to Cincinnati, and with inadequate rest plunge right into an afternoon game there.
This was indefensible. Translating all times onto Cincinnati clocks, the fifth game ended at 10:56 P.M. Friday night in California; the sixth game started at 1 P.M. Saturday afternoon in Cincinnati, with the players having spent what night there was flying at thirty thousand feet. This is a pretty high price to pay for television income, but Commissioner Kuhn saw nothing wrong:
It would have been a terrible thing to postpone Saturday’s game in Cincinnati. The thousands of fans who had bought tickets could not have used them on another day. Besides, the players had eight hours’ rest, fully enough. I don’t think we acted in an unprofessional way.
Two comments are essential. The decision to play the weekday games at night was not forced upon baseball by television; it was the baseball powers, eager for that big night audience, who made the decision, forcing it upon the network. (Television, whose big fall season coincides with the World Series, was not eager to disrupt regular scheduling lest viewers who did not watch baseball be attracted to the new fall shows on the other networks.) But Commissioner Kuhn was right in his prediction that the World Series at night would be a fantastic success; it even outdrew All in the Family and smothered its football competition. On Saturday afternoon it drew a 20.1 rating as against 9.1 for the Oklahoma-Colorado game; on Sunday it outrated the Detroit Lions-San Diego Chargers game 25.7 to 11.8. But to many the violations done to the spirit of the game seemed far too high a price for favorable television ratings.
The guardians of each game will have to keep close watch on the concessions required by television. There is nothing unusual about this. Writers have to maintain the same kind of vigilance, and so do businessmen. Sports, however, are subject to special pressures because of the magnitude of the money involved, and their protectors will have to be trebly strong to resist improper inducements.
We must keep in mind the size of the television pot. In 1963 television paid football—college and professional—$13,900,000. By 1966 this had grown to $41,100,000, and in 1968 to $54,700,000. In 1970 it was $58,000,000, and in 1975, $60,000.000.
Pro football is a good litmus test. In 1963 television paid $926,000 for the NFL title game. From 1970 through 1975 Super Bowl tabs have hovered at $2,500,000. Colleges and universities participated in the outpouring of the cornucopia, gathering $5,100,000 in 1963, $10,200,000 in 1968, $12,000.000 in 1970 and $16,000,000 in 1975.
Golf has enjoyed a similar bonanza. In 1961 it gleaned a miserly $150,000. Ten years later, in 1971, $3,000,000. In 1976 it should go to $5,000,000.
Baseball’s profits from the tube have been equally spectacular, and when radio income is added, positively startling. In 1960 nationwide and World Series rights went for $3,250,000. In 1970, $ 16.600.000. And in 1970 nationwide rights alone were worth $43,000,000. Local rights for 1976 should be another $35,000,000.
The overall television expenditure for sports, counting the specials and the oddball events, is a staggering $200,000,000 per year. (In an Olympic year add another $19,900,000.) And this is money, by and large, that was not available to sports two decades ago. This bonan
za produces three consequences: professional leagues must get their fair share of the television dollar or expire; universities must figure out some way of distributing the television dollar more equitably than now, or many schools with great names in football will have to quit the sport; since profits have been so vastly multiplied, the potential for corruption has also grown.
Sport by sport, let us observe what changes have been forced by television and judge which of them have been justified and which not.
We have already seen how consideration for television can determine how a World Series shall be played. I object to playing a twi-night game in California; I think it a perversion of the sport. But given the time differences between west coast and east, I see no way to avoid this, and I suppose the teams will have to learn to adjust to it. But forcing teams to fly cross-continent without adequate rest, to fit into a television timetable which could have been revised, is a violation of common sense and should not be tolerated. Nor would I permit, in order to retain the big Saturday-afternoon audience in Cincinnati, the cancellation of a Friday game in California, to be replayed later at some more convenient date. The upsetting of the home-away schedule with its subtle advantages would be contrary to the best interests of baseball.
Colorful uniforms, decorative ball parks like Three Rivers in Pittsburgh and Royals in Kansas City, and the use of the go-carts to haul pitchers in from the bull pen, innovations encouraged by television, are commendable, and I would like to see more of them. New rules to hurry up the game would also be in order: fewer warm-up pitches except in case of sudden injury to the starting pitcher (which would mean that the bull-pen pitchers might not be ready) and the granting immediately of intentional walks. I am not satisfied that the designated hitter (the innovation whereby an older slugger who can still hit but is not spry enough to field bats regularly in place of the weak-hitting pitcher, who never bats) adds much to the game; in the games I’ve attended he has batted about .214, which hardly compensates for the disruption of the orderly statistics of the sport.
Sports in America Page 39
